How does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Francoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portrait the painted portrait, framed appears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing.
Meltzer'sreadings of textual portraits in the Gospel writers and Huysmans, Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and...

Why are contemporary secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century? In a book that faces crucial issues in both critical and feminist inquiry, Francoise Meltzer uses the story of Joan as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent. She argues that critics who place excessive emphasis on opposition and difference remain blind to their nostalgia for the pre-Cartesian idea that the body and mind are the same.
Engaging a...

Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with "Critical Inquiry" and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that "Critical Inquiry" encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida's work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, "Signature Derrida" provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought. These essays define three significant "periods" in Derrida's writing: his...

"This book draws on literature, painting, and a never-before-seen cache of photographs to explore the representation of catastrophe and the targeting of civilians in war. Focusing on images of Nazi Germany's bombed-out cities, the author connects the fraught aesthetics of ruins with the problem of how to acknowledge German suffering."--Provided by

Stan bardzo dobry - książka była czytana, ale jeszcze długo posłuży innym czytelnikom. Ma ślady używania - otwierania i kartkowania, rysy, zabrudzenia. Wygląda jak książka, którą wypożyczasz w bibliotece.

The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. "Seeing Double "reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing...